Archive for the ‘Acting’ Category

A little while back, I stumbled into watching the 2014 The Legend of Hercules for the, omigod, second time. Starring an immensely muscled Kellan Lutz as the great hero of myth, embedded in a famous stinker of a movie whose faults are at least in part linguistic. Though it does offer tons of glistening male flesh for aficionados.

From the annals of tv watching: Eddie Cahill as Tag Jones in season 7 of the sitcom Friends (and then as Det. Don Flack in CSI: New York); and Lucas Black as Special Agent Christopher LaSalle on NCIS: New Orleans. Both men are strongly physical actors with mobile expressive faces and both smile amiably a lot — they are really cute guys — and both do notable local accents: EC white working-class NYC in CSI: New York and LB white NOLA in NCIS: New Orleans. Both accents build on the actors’ native varieties — EC’s NYC and LB’s Alabamian — but with crafting (quite considerable on LB’s part) to fit their characters.

Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches & Part Two: Perestroika by Tony Kushner, directed by Marianne Elliott. Original broadcasts to cinemas 20 and 27 July; Palo Alto screenings 14 and 21 August, and 20 and 27 August

Two pieces of recent news from the L&G world: a Tony for Fun Home (on the L side), a NYT interview with the French ambassador to the US (on the G side). Bonus on the G side: a photographic tribute to David Hockney.

To remind you: Lazlo Crannich is an actor who performs the character of Zippy the Pinhead: when you see Zippy in public, you’re actually seeing Lazlo, and who knows where the real Zippy is or what he’s doing. So Lazlo is a kind of double — a permanent double, so to speak. Lazlo has a (very constrained) private life under his own name, which we catch glimpses of in the strip, but Zippy’s private life is forever invisible to us. It’s a kind of magic irrealism., a counterpart to the literary magic realism I write about here every so often.

In my own fiction writing about two people called Sundance and Butch, there’s a good bit of magic realism, plus a lot of play on identities, names, and the performance of characters.

In the middle of the night on Saturdays here the TNT network shows re-runs of the current Hawaii Five-0 tv series, so I’m kept alert by acrobatic fistfights, exchanges of gunfire, and car chases all over scenic Hawaii. And the banter between the two principal characters — it’s a buddy drama, a bro show — with significant interludes of muscular shirtlessness.